Who owns the water service line in Concord, CA
Contra Costa Water District lays the water service line from its main to your meter and charges the applicant for it, and it installs, sets and maintains the meter. Where that meter sits is settled by the District's own standard drawing, approved for use in August 2024: at the back of the curb or the back of the sidewalk, with everything past it marked "PRIVATE SYSTEM" on its meter sheets. Bear in mind what that drawing is - a standard for what gets built now, rather than a statement about a service laid decades ago. What no CCWD document says is who repairs the pipe between the main and the meter - so that is the question to ask before you need the answer. This is Contra Costa Water District's own statement.
Which part of the pipe is yours
Yours from the meter to your building
Why, and what to doYours from the cleanout to your building
Why, and what to do
Where the responsibility divides
- Contra Costa Water District
- The meter, stated; the service line, installed but not spoken for. CCWD's Code of Regulations provides that "CCWD shall install, set, and maintain a meter on each active water service connection", and charges a new applicant "a service line charge to cover CCWD's costs of installing a service line from the main adjacent to the property to be served". Where CCWD's own operations require a connection to be moved, section 5.08.050 does the work "without cost to the customer served by the connection". The Code states no ownership of the service line and no duty to repair it.
- The property owner
- Everything from the meter into the building. CCWD's Standard Detail SD-4, approved for use in August 2024, places the meter box at "BACK-OF-CURB OR BACK-OF-SIDEWALK" on every sheet, and on its meter sheets marks the run downstream of the meter "PRIVATE SYSTEM". The Code adds that each water user "shall bear the risk of loss, and shall be responsible for the carriage, control, handling, storage, distribution and use of all water furnished by CCWD from and beyond the point of delivery", and the District's leak adjustment requires that "the customer promptly repaired all known or apparent water leaks beyond the point of delivery by CCWD".
- What else is worth knowing
- One thing here is settled and one is not, and knowing which is which is worth more than a confident answer. Settled: the meter sits at the back of the curb or the back of the sidewalk, and the District's own construction standard marks everything past it as your private system. So the run across your garden to the house is yours, and CCWD keeps up the meter itself. Not settled: who repairs the service line between the main and that meter. CCWD installs it and bills the applicant for installing it, and no document that could be found - not the Code of Regulations, not the customer pages - says who owns that pipe afterwards or who pays when it fails. The Code makes you responsible "from and beyond the point of delivery" without ever defining where the point of delivery is. Do not read the District's duty to maintain the meter as an answer: elsewhere in California the same fact goes both ways, with one district keeping the pipe to the property line and another disclaiming every inch past the meter. If a leak is between the main and your meter, ask CCWD who is repairing it before you engage anybody, and get the answer in writing. One thing that is written down: CCWD offers optional HomeServe cover for "customer-owned utility equipment" including an exterior water line, which tells you a customer-owned exterior line exists and still does not say where it starts.
What Contra Costa Water District has told the State
Federal rules required every community water system to inventory its service lines and publish the result. These are the figures this one filed.
Contra Costa Water District has classified more of its service lines than most of California: 0.00% of its lines are unclassified, against 9.2% statewide.
- 60,823
- 0 (0.00%)
What this does not tell you
- This describes who is responsible for which part of the pipe. It is not a record of what your own service line is made of.
- Classified does not mean inspected, and this system inspected less than most. Contra Costa Water District established 2.8% of its classifications by field inspection, against 22% across California; the rest come from records, the year of construction, or a predictive model.
- These figures were submitted to the State by the water system itself and were read on 2026-09-04. They may not reflect its current inventory - the system's own page is the place to confirm anything about a specific address.
Your other pipe has a different answer
For the sewer lateral, Concord says:
The split is at your property line cleanout, and the half under the street is the City's property rather than yours - even if an applicant paid to build it. Everything applicants pay for "(excepting property sewers)" becomes, "upon acceptance by the city ... the property of the city, which shall have the right to repair, replace, and maintain the same". Your side is the property sewer, from that cleanout back to the building, and "each owner shall keep his property sewer in good order at his own expense".
Your sewer lateral is yours to the cleanout; your water line stops being yours at the meter.
Who pays for the sewer lateral in Concord, CAHow this compares across California
- Why your two pipes disagree — the places where the sewer and water authorities contradict each other about the run beneath the road.
- Which water systems know what is buried — how much of each California system’s network the utility can actually identify.